Friday, October 31, 2008

A week out from the election, the fact that we can even talktalk about the possibility of a Labour-led government beingelected is a tribute to the nerve, desperation and sheerratlike cunning with which Helen Clark and her LabourParty colleagues have fought to retain power. Thoughdistasteful at times, it has been quite refreshing to see themhaving to go for it like this. In a perverse sort of way itseems more honest. At least it has got Clark off her pedestaland onto the pavements again. She is even acknowledging now that up until recently it had been impossible to ignorethe fact that voters wanted a change of government; but inher view the global credit crisis has got people thinkingagain. Well, she would say that, wouldn't she; but the firstpart of that (reported) statement is quite an admission forthe PM to make. In fact, I think it's a first.

By all odds National should still win this election and takepower, even if only propped up by Rodney Hide and PeterDunne; but you just can’t rule out Labour squeaking back,along with some combination of the Greens, the MaoriParty and maybe New Zealand First. Suggestions that sucha result might somehow be undemocratic if Labour winsfewer votes than National betray a misunderstanding ofhow MMP works; they indicate, in fact, how persistent the“two major parties” mentality still is, as if only Labour orNational had the God-given right to rule this nation till theend of time. MMP is not about making it easier for a “majorparty” to govern; it’s about authentically reflecting the willof the people, as the first-past-the-post system hardly everdid. A three-, four- or five-party coalition is just as valid anexpression of that will as any. One reason alone for notvoting National, actually, is their transparent willingness totamper with or even abolish MMP. We’ve got this baby thisfar; let’s not deny it the chance to grow up and reachmaturity.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

David Farrar on Kiwiblog has come up with a rather sad listof 85 things he reckons the Greens would ban. This is hisattempt to paint the Greens as “the ultimate nanny stateparty.” For instance, he says, they would ban smacking,factory farming, coal-mining, nuclear power and fizzydrinks from schools. Such rhetoric is useful for fillingblogspace because it requires no original thought, just theclosing of one eye and the shutting down of half the brain.If you want to talk bans, it would be just as valid to say thatthe political right, among whom Farrar is proud to counthimself, would ban the minimum wage from going up, banKiwibank from being a true people’s bank, ban freedom ofchoice for workers in favour of freedom of choice forcurrency speculators, ban students from critical thinking,ban whatever gets in the way of the sacred right to makeprivate gain at public expense. The list is endless. There’sone ban I would like to see, though, and that’s a ban on theinane phrase “nanny state.” Fact is, the “free market,” withits insidious ideology and its economic power, puts far morerestraints on the way we live than any state or governmentever does.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

It would be amusing if it weren’t so bloody serious toobserve the governments of the world faffing aboutand flapping their hands over “solutions” to the“global crisis.” One can only view with the deepestcynicism the cloudy bluster of politicians who nowundertake to "fix" the problem with "strong" action.(Barack Obama is no better than the others in thisrespect; to make a real difference, once in the WhiteHouse, he would have to promote an economicrevolution.) The fact is that by a series of considereddecisions from the 1970s on, these same governmentsdeliberately fostered the conditions in which capitalmarkets could run free from virtually all restraint. Theborders of nation-states melted away as sharebrokers,investment bankers and currency speculators prettymuch did what they liked, especially whencomputerization lent wings to their transactions. Nor,at the global level, was there ever a regulatory body such as commodity trade has with the WTO, howeverineffectual it might be. You could say it was a licence toprint money but hey, not even a licence was required.Now we (viz, the vast majority of the world’s populationwho are not market players) must all bear the negativeconsequences of a speculative bubble that we never shared or even saw the benefits of.

New Zealand signed up to all this, of course, in the 1980s,so can hardly complain now. Maybe we had no choice incertain matters, eg, unpegging the dollar, given the way the US and Britain were moving in those days; but wecould have done a lot more to protect our nationaleconomy and the people who make it work. Imposing GSTon financial transactions above a certain limit, for instance.But no, the “markets” were not to be trammelled in anyway; they were supposed to be our saviours, ensuring thatby means of “the invisible hand” everything would work outfairly in the end. Well, we can see the invisible hand now:and it turns out, all along, to have been giving us the fingers.

Monday, October 27, 2008

Some figurative paintings by Toss Woollaston on a wall.I like these. A self-portrait from 1976; Edith at the piano;a young man called Jeremy Classen on a rocky slope.The human figures are so blended with their environmentthat you can’t tell where they end and it starts. This arttells us the physical truth about ourselves, namely, thatthe matter of which we are made varies only in form—andeven then by not much—from all other matter. The samespirit animates all. There is in fact no such thing as "theenvironment” supposedly existing apart from us humanbeings. We are as much a part of it as the leaves on thetrees or the worms in the soil. Even to speak of “nature”betrays a modern urban consciousness.

In Woollaston’s painting Edith and the piano are one; theman is the mountainside is the man. The artist himself isthe world.

Saturday, October 25, 2008

“In a sense, I am a moralist, insofar as I believe that oneof the meanings of human existence—the source ofhuman freedom—is never to accept anything asdefinitive, untouchable, obvious or immobile.”—Michel Foucault, 1980

“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks.But in each event—in the living act, the undoubteddeed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thingputs forth the moulding of its features from behind theunreasoning mask.”—Ahab to Ishmael in Moby-Dick.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

At 5 o’clock this morning a bird somewhere nearby sendsout a single piping call over and over, like radio time pips.The other day, from my car window I heard a musicalphrase, five evenly spaced notes, the fifth falling away.What birds these are I don’t know. Frankly I can scarcelytell one from the other. Sparrow, blackbird, thrush, tui,fantail…sure; after that, however, my ornithologicalawareness rating is low. But I seem to have grown moresensitized to birdsong, because I hear it clearly and oftennow, often above the roar of the traffic. (Then again, if youtrain yourself, walking down a city shopping street likeLambton Quay, you can isolate the clopping, clacking,shuffling sound of thousands of human footfallsceaselessly hitting the pavement; and sometimes,especially as dusk comes on in winter, the birds make atremendous noise in the trees on the Quay as they sort outtheir roosts for the night.) Whatever the street, though, I’llbe walking along and suddenly my attention will be caughtand held by some mighty outpouring of song and I’ll lookup and there’s one of the little fuckers chirping his tinyheart out on the top of a lamp-post as if the continuance ofthe universe depended on it.

So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

I'm glad to see the New Zealand Book Council drawingattention in its latest e-newsletter to E M Forster's shortstory "The Machine Stops." Written in 1909, and unlikeanything else Forster ever wrote, it's a remarkablyprescient vision of the future as imagined by a greatwriter 100 years ago. He got it far more rightthan Wells or Verne ever did. "The Machine Stops" canbe found in Forster's Collected Short Stories and also inits entirety here.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

The deep structure of news reporting requires certainnarrative loops to be regularly, repetitively completed.This is particularly true of election campaigns, which,in a way that is highly satisfactory to the media, have aclear beginning, middle and end, and can be easilyreduced to their baldest, most obvious form: thecontest, the race, the fight. The metaphors areirresistible when you don't have the time, resources orincentives to think harder and report deeper.

At some point, you can bet, the gloves will come off. Adebate will take place at which a knockout blow couldoccur. But the knockout blow isn't delivered. It never is, actually. What would it look like if it was? No matter.The stale imagery, into which the mind can slide withminimal brain strain, does the job. At any given timesomeone has to be on the back foot and someone musthave the upper hand. At some point there will be a stark contrast between two parties or politicians—but, lo,they will then be singing from the same songsheet.Someone else will play the get-tough-on-crime card...

We have an impoverished language for this kind ofreporting and commentary, and as George Orwell saidin "Politics and the English Language," the moreslovenly the language, the lazier and vaguer the thinking.

In the information society there is only onenews story permanently running—an endlesspseudo-event cooked up according to aninvariable recipe and operating on a basis offinancial viability. It’s just that the corpsesfloating in this soup come from differentplaces at different times of the year.—Victor Pelevin

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Time is a choice. We choose time: the pace, feel, shape,length and location of it. It could be a room, a road, astage, a step, a presence, made from what we rememberof the past and what we imagine of the future. Time ismemory and imagination; there is, literally, no time likethe present.

"To be conscious is not to be in time."—Eliot

Yet I am haunted by the impression that time is passing...I shape my day, each day, to satisfy this ghost.

You could say for instance that 53 years have passedsince, at the age of eight, I was sent to the Otaki healthcamp for three months—because apparently I was toosmall for my age and needed building up. Certainly I wassomething of a runt, nearly always the smallest boy inthe class till my mid-teens. The ethos then was thatchildren needed lots of fresh air and sunshine and dairyproducts and as little as possible skulking around insidereading books and stuff. Having thoughts. I rememberfaintly the dining-hall and dormitory at Otaki, and someincident in the classroom in which we were taught(normal school lessons continued). It was winter; we usedto be taken for walks down through the pines to the beach,but I can't recall whether or not we swam. I do recalllashings of tripe and cod liver oil, administered daily.Ironically, shortly after coming home, having put on weightif not height, I was assailed by a wave of headaches soexcruciating that I had to go into hospital for observation.These have not recurred since.

“Life is a busy, happy business at a Health Camp.”—advertisement, Listener, 24.9.54

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Will there be a worldwide financial crash? This questionwas asked more than a year ago by Brian Easton in hisListener Economy column. He spelt out the whole chainreaction that in his view must inevitably occur sooner orlater in international financial markets—and indeed ithas happened just as he said it would. It was a veryprescient column. Easton also wrote: “As far as can bejudged, our financial system is sound, and can bearsignificant pressure from the world economy.” If that’sright, then in my view Finance Minister Michael Cullenshould get a big chunk of the credit for keeping NewZealand relatively stable.

Also able to see what was coming, with an unswervingeye, was Bryan Gould, whose 2006 book The DemocracySham laid out the whole grisly scenario. “We are,”hewrote then, “a heartbeat away from a global crash.”

Should we pay more heed to voices like these? I think so.They are still speaking—Easton in his Listener columnsand on his website, Gould in his new book Rescuing theNew Zealand Economy.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Hearing the Greens on Checkpoint wrestling with thevagaries of the Auckland transport system, if system itcan be called, I'm reminded of a blown opportunityright up there with IBM turning away Bill Gates andDecca saying no to the Beatles. In his memoir A Lifetime in Politics, former Labour MP Warren Freerrecalls that in the early 1960s the Auckland City Councilagreed to an inner-city underground rail systemconnecting the northern and southern suburban lines.Good grief. Was it so? “Mayor Dove Myer Robinsoneven got to the stage of being photographed operatinga pneumatic drill where the work would be commenced.Goosman put a finish to that! The Auckland motorwaysystem was born…”

Stan Goosman, the Minister of Works at the time, was,Freer notes, a successful roading contractor whose“natural leanings were towards development of roads andmotorways rather than rail.” The National governmentalso stopped—in its tracks, as it were—the Nelson railwayproject started by its Labour predecessor. Drive, they said.

Between parent and child the messages pass invisiblyback and forth, like electrical impulses along a wire.Not all of them are clear or even comprehensible;many go completely unheard—at the time. But theyall register in the tangled circuitry of the heart andmay be reactivated years later by memory, chance orcircumstance. No communication is ever expunged.The blow struck in 1955 or the word said in 1982 stillvibrates in time, like the echo from the formation ofthe universe.

Diderot believed that everything we have ever seen,known, heard or experienced—right down to a tint oflight or the look of grains of sand on a beach—continuesto exist within us. We retain these things in our mindsbut fail to remember them.

Monday, October 13, 2008

I’d have thought John Key was on shaky ground in toutinghis credentials for governing New Zealand by boasting, ashe did yesterday in his campaign launch speech, “I’veactually worked in the world of finance and business.Helen Clark hasn’t. I’ve actually picked up a strugglingbusiness and made it grow. Helen Clark never has. AndI’ve actually got stuck into a business, trimmed its sails,and delivered some profits to its shareholders.”

Right. Wait a minute. Doesn’t Key come out of the sameright-wing camp that has insisted for the past 25 yearsthat it’s a mistake to give executive control of socialinstitutions and government departments to peoplewho actually know something about the work beingdone in those places? That’s why, consistently since 1984,we’ve seen accountants being appointed to run places likehospitals and Treasury wonks to take charge of ministrieslike Education. By the same token, Key would be the lastperson qualified to run an economy, especially as theparticular business he was in—investment banking—is allabout maximizing profit pretty much regardless of otherconsiderations, and doubly especially given the currentcrisis, which has been visited on us by the colossalmismanagement of, you guessed it, investment bankers.

Key’s long speech, it should be noted, contains not a single reference to the environment, global warming, climatechange, peak oil or anything of that nature (this nature,our nature); even the centre-right's favourite weasel-word,"sustainable," fails to get a look-in. His 11 "commitments"are so bereft of ecological awareness that they amount togiving a drowning man money instead of a lifeline. So muchfor the future. Oh well, it’s only a planet we're talking about.

I am a great lover of the popular song, and have nopreconceptions about what qualifies as a great one.Cole Porter’s “Every Time You Say Goodbye” is anexquisitely made song; you wouldn’t call “Knowing Me,Knowing You” by Abba exquisite exactly, but on its ownterms it’s a tremendous song too. So is “WutheringHeights” by Kate Bush, though she never came near todoing another like it. For exquisite you could also go toPaul Simon’s “René and Georgette Magritte With TheirDog After the War,” which is near perfect as dammit.I love the sheer craft that goes into the making of thesesongs and the way they touch universal emotions withtheir particular combinations of music and lyric. "Safein My Garden" by the Mamas & the Papas moves me totears. Nick Cave's "Into My Arms," Rodgers & Hart's"Where or When" as sung by Lena Horne...I could go on.I won't. We all have our favourites. So I thank themakers of those songs, who have given me such pleasureand even joy, not to mention emotional guidance, overthe years. From "The Boxer" to "Born at the Right Time,"from "My Little Town" to "Graceland," Paul Simon isunquestionably one of them. Happy birthday, Paul.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Amid the raging tumult of the election campaign, it mayhave been possible to miss the significance of theannouncement by Kapiti Coast District Council that thestatus of the proposed Western Link Road has beenreduced from “highway” to “local road.” At the moment,the only way to drive north from Paraparaumu Beach toWaikanae is State Highway 1, which means that thethousands of people living between the highway and thecoast have to cover much more distance than the crowwould if it flew. The Western Link Road, much nearerthe coast, would have made the journey more direct.

I was living on the Kapiti Coast when this project wasinitially mooted; at that stage, a few years ago, it wasgoing to be a four-lane highway with major intersections.The term "super-highway" gained some currency. A fewweeks ago, however, the council knocked two lanes offthat concept and now they're cutting right back on feederlanes and hormone-fed intersections. According to somecouncil panjandrum, quoted in the Dominion Post,reducing the number of lanes at intersections will reducethe road's environmental footprint, "making it more of alocal road than a highway." Let me quote further:

The council commissioned Common GroundStudio, of Auckland, to come up with a moreenvironmentally friendly, lower-impact designthat preserved landscape features such as largedunes, rather than bulldozing through them.

Glory be. Could the blinding reality of Peak Oil finally bebecoming perceivable at municipal level? We are going tosee a lot more of this from now on: fewer new roads, andless grandiose ones if they get built at all. You don't haveto be an environmentalist to get your mind round this, justan economist—though truth to tell, the two jobs are oneand the same. Kapiti councillor Peter Daniel has got thehang of it anyway. "We are facing hard economic times,"he says. "If we do not think small, I do not think we will getanything."

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Anticipate is a lovely word with a precise and very usefulmeaning, one that no other word supplies. It means tosuccessfully guess or figure out what’s going to happenand to act accordingly. A rugby player who anticipates apass by a member of the other team is one who correctlypicks which way the pass will go and intercepts it or insome way negates its intended effect. Many years ago,however, anticipate began to be used in the sense ofexpect, and now it’s commonly used that way,particularly by politicians who think a long word soundsmore important than a short one. Thus John Key intoday’s New Zealand Herald, commenting on the stateof the nation’s accounts, as disclosed by Treasury:

We had anticipated they would be bad, but theywere a bit worse than we had anticipated.

If the word is correctly used, then it's impossible forsomething to be worse than you anticipated. Expected,yes. Expected would have done the job perfectly well. Ifyou must cut taxes, John, then cut back on the syllablestoo. And help conserve a good word while you're at it.

Monday, October 6, 2008

Of all political issues, “law and order” is the slipperiestbanana in the bunch. Short of a genuine terroristthreat, it is far and away the easiest issue to whip upfear and loathing about, and that goes both forpoliticians and the media. Actually it is not even an"issue" separable from society as a whole but seizingon it and hyping it up is the first resort of the under-stimulated news editor and the overblown politician.I issue them both a challenge: try and debate thesecomplex matters without once using the words “lawand order” and see where it gets you. The phrase haslost all genuine meaning, so you won’t miss it,believe me. But not having to fall back on it, like asoft cushion, might just make your thinking learn tostand on its own two feet.

Friday, October 3, 2008

Every 12 years, as a rule, a New Zealand general electioncoincides with an American presidential election. Thelast two times it has happened, the latter scarcelyimpacted on the former, mainly because the presidentialcampaigns were one-horse races. Nixon was a shoo-in in1972 and Clinton equally so against Bob Dole in 1996(there was no clash in 1984, because of the snap electionhere in July that year). In any case, the electronic mediawere far less pervasive then; and besides, the presidentialcontest is all over by the first Tuesday in November,whereas New Zealand’s elections tend not to be held tilllater in the month, leaving at least a couple of weeks foran unovershadowed campaign. Not this time; the twocountries’ elections are only four days apart, and theshadow of the Obama/McCain contest looms so large thatit’s making the Clark/Key tussle seem even moreinsignificant than it actually is (in global terms). Thefinancial crisis only deepens the shadow; Tom Scott sumsit up well in today’s Dominion Post with a cartoonshowing Clark and Key saying grumpily to Wall St, “Doyou mind—we’re trying to run an election down here.”

Most elections are decided by swing voters, many of whommake up their minds pretty late, so we can say with somecertainty that America’s choice on November 4 will be a biginfluence on New Zealand’s choice on November 8. In thatsense a win for John McCain would, ironically, be goodnews for Helen Clark, suggesting that in times of economicupheaval you should stick with the known and the safe, ofwhatever political stripe. Some New Zealand voters mayalready have reached that conclusion, especially given theNational Party’s vagueness about its economic policy. Forthat reason, clearly, the Nats have indicated that they’llannounce the details of their proposed tax cuts earlier thanintended, ahead of the official campaign launch on October12. The Wall St crisis and the “global credit crunch” haveput them in a tricky spot, however: how can they fund theirlavish promises without being improvident at the very timewhen governments ought to be being fiscally conservative?

John Key reassures us that the economy is fundamentally ingood enough shape to allow such tax cuts to proceed, butthat argument cuts both ways too: by advancing it, he’s onlyvalidating the Labour Government’s economicmanagement.

Equally ironically, an Obama win would favour Key. Buteither way, as the respective campaigns proceed, NewZealand interest in the US election is tending to swampdomestic issues: as I write, the airwaves and the internetare alive with talk about the Biden/Palin vice-presidentialdebate. It’s hard to imagine a Michael Cullen/Bill Englishdebate arousing such fascination; in fact, such a debate isnot even scheduled to take place. The whole electioncampaign is dribbling along in an inconsequential way.Genuine policy debate is virtually invisible; we get stirredup only by personalities and peccadilloes. The truth is,fellow Kiwis, we’re barely interesting to ourselves. Ormaybe we know, deep down, that what happens inWashington is far more likely to influence our economicand social well-being than what happens in Wellington.Therefore, with such tiny power as we have, pen poisedover the ballot paper six Saturdays from now, we mightwant to consider the extent to which we wish to encourageor discourage the kind of mentality that has made Wall Sta byword for greed and hubris. Vote locally, think globally.